Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.
I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.
I didn't go to high school. I think that after you learn to read and write and do your numbers and flush the toilet behind yourself, you don't need no more schoolin'. You need to get out in the water and swim.
Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.
So, for instance, if you came to me, I'd ask, 'Do you want to write? Do you want to improvise? Why do you want to play this instrument? What do you want to do?'
Golf is a game in which you yell 'fore,' shoot six, and write down five.
Sometimes when I visit schools, kids will interview me for the school newspaper. They ask me questions and my answers tend to go on and on, and they try to write down everything I'm saying as quickly as they can. And one day, a kid holds up her hand and said, 'Do you think you could just answer 'yes' or 'no?' Aren't kids wonderful?
There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.
Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.
When I started writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America.
It's hard to write a song about reality because reality doesn't rhyme.
Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.
If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.
What I tell myself is that there is never going to be another 'Gone Girl' for me. I mean, I really believe that. I think I'll write other good books; I have faith in that.
I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they're not because I write in the first person.
I write larger than life. It's what I do.
Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.
Sometimes I write notes that I have difficulty singing.
I think reviewers have become particularly venomous because, in a way, the power has been sucked from them. A 15-year-old can write a review on the Internet and it means as much as Roger Ebert's review, and that just makes Roger Ebert mad, so he comes out harder and stronger.
I don't really write with living actors in mind. I guess I write for dead actors. I'll think of like, you know, Burt Lancaster would be good in this part, and so on. With 'L.A. Confidential,' it was like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if Dean Martin played the Kevin Spacey part?'
They asked me to write it and zoomed me over there to do it. But they ended up sacking me.
Ultimately, you have to write what's coming at any given point in time. Fighting your instincts for practical reasons is a losing battle.
If you're writing, it means getting up and writing all day, and if you're filming, it's getting up and filming all day. I get up, go to my computer, write, turn it off, and go to bed. That is a Clarkson day.
I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
I write my programs primarily for myself.
English is my first language, but musically speaking, I write my music in Spanish.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR committed a most visionary act: He appointed a Harvard historian to write the official account of the U.S. Navy in World War II. Samuel Eliot Morison was given the rank of lieutenant commander, with the right to interview anyone of whatever status.
You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.
Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.
The charms of women were never more powerful never inspired such achievements, as in those immortal periods, when they could neither read nor write.
I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.
Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write.
Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.
We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.
I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.
